Building Employee Engagement and Resilience Through Strengths-Based Leadership

Abstract

Modern careers are enacted in turbulent and stressful environments and workers face increasing uncertainty in navigating their careers. Therefore, it is essential to support workers in coping with stress by enhancing their resilience. We propose that strengths-based leaders help their workers to find their own unique pathway to developing resilience by building upon their pre-existing strengths. In turn, we propose that resilience allows workers to transform the support and opportunities provided by their strengths-based leader into the active state of work engagement. We conducted a two-wave time-lagged survey among a representative sample of 1,095 Dutch employees. Results of our structural equation modelling indicated that T1 strengths-based leadership was positively related to T2 employee work engagement and that T2 employee resilience mediated the relationship between strengths-based leadership (T1) and employee work engagement (T2). We conclude that strengths-based leadership might be a tool to develop a resilient and engaged workforce and make suggestions for developing strengths-based leadership.

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